MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

At the moment I’m spending a couple of afternoons a week at the British Library.  I get off at Euston Station tube and then make the shortish walk from there to the library.

It seems that the powers that be at Euston Station want to encourage you to walk, not only to the library but to St. Pancras and King's Cross stations, and there are marked walking routes that supposedly help you to avoid the pollution of the Euston Road.

As a natural subversive this is troubling to me.  Yes, I want to walk, but I don't want to be told to walk, and I certainly don’t want to be told where to walk.

So I’ve been taking short cuts through the Ossulton Estate, a collection of council flats built in the late 1920s and early 30s.  When I first walked walked through, it all seemed very east European and ruined, movie-set-ish, and you know me, I like that sort of thing.

And I was reminded of Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna which is a fine building made much less grim, though no less cinematic, by being painted red.

But now I see that the part of the Ossulton Estate I walked through - Levita House - wasn’t really in ruin.  It was apparently just being stripped down in preparation for a new paint job, so that it now looks like this.

Me, I’d have painted it red.

This being the winter, it’s generally dark when I leave the British Library, and as I walk out I look up at Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue, widely known as “Newton After Blake” which looms over me, without quite making eye contact.

Of that triumverate - Paolozzi, Newton and Blake - I think only the last had much interest in walking.

WELL-IN, IN WELWYN

Ebenezer Howard, the father of the English garden city, was educated for a time at  a boarding school in Sudbury, Suffolk. It was the kind of school that sent its pupils out walking on Saturday mornings.  On once of these walks Ebenezer picked some wild flowers and carried them back at school, where he went to his room and scattered the petals around the floor.  

I’ll let Ebenezer take it from here, “This being discovered I was ordered to meet my teacher down stairs. The younger one, Miss Emma Foster, set about me pretty severely with a cane, and presently said to her sister, 'Do you think I have given him enough?' Her reply was, 'No, I think he should have some more.'  Shortly afterwards I went to my room in order to discover the localities of my various wounds which were not very severe.” He was about eight years old at the time, as far as I can tell.

Now, I can’t speak for conditions in Sudbury in the mid 19^th century but if any eight year old lad at my school. some hundred years later, had picked flowers while walking, much less strewed the petals around when he got back, he’d have received various wounds from his fellow pupils long before any teacher could get to him.  It was a different age.

I went for a walk in Welwyn Garden City last weekend, Ebenezer Howard’s second attempt at a garden suburb, much less ambitious and impressive than Letchworth.  I did see the occasional flower in wintery bloom, but I didn’t pick any. I was more tempted by these mushrooms but I didn't pick them either, since my mycological identification still isn’t up to snuff.

I went to see the house Howard had lived – 5 Guessens Road, it's the one on the left and yep, it’s a semi:

And nearby was a house that one of city’s architects – Louis de Soissons - built for himself, detached, and somewhat grander than Howard’s, though still comparatively modest given the kind of houses architects tend to build for themselves.

Perhaps it was crass of me to see something phallic in the arrangement of the city’s central streets but I did:

Actually my pal Matthew Licht said it looks more like a bong, and he's right). 
          There was also a certain amount of public nude statuary here and there.  This one is titled “Ad Astra” and yes, it was a cold day:

This one is “Dawn,” a fleshier specimen:

The best thing that happened in Welwyn Garden City was this: I was walking around, mooching you’d probably say, looking at things, occasionally taking pictures, and I spotted a house that was having its roof worked on, but the existing tiles were being replaced with new tiles that were of a wildly unmatching colour.  

Knowing that most conservation areas are beset with rules and regulations about the most minor changes people can do to their houses, this seemed surprising and well worth a photograph or two.   

And as I was taking a picture, the front door of the house next door opened and a neighbour came running out – a formidable, chunky middle-aged woman, obviously somebody not to be trifled with, although I did intend to stand my ground if, as I expected, she started telling me I wasn’t allowed to take pictures.  But that wasn’t what she had in mind at all.

She said, “I saw you taking a picture of that roof.  Isn’t it awful?   It’s completely the wrong colour.  Even when they were starting I kept saying those tiles are all wrong but they just carried on, and they said they’d blend in once they’d weathered.  But I knew that couldn’t be right,  And anyway finally the builder admitted that he’d ordered the wrong colour tiles and now he's going to have to take them all down and start again with the right coloured tiles. And in the meantime it just looks absolutely dreadful.”

The suburbanite in me stirred.  I agreed with her completely.

EMPIRE OF THE STUNNED

Between Christmas and the New Year I went with Foster Spragge on the final walk of her As the Crow Flies project.  Mat Clum of Tickbird&Rhino was there too.  He’s the one on the left in the picture below (taken by Foster) in the Woolwich tunnel.

By the time you read this, an exhibition of drawings done during these walks (along with others), will be on display at the Westminster Reference Library, 35 St Martin's St, London, WC2H 7HP.  Hurry along, why don't you?

I joined Mat and Foster in Hackney Wick (above) – they’d started further upstream, and we walked to Woolwich, like this:

And then this:

We were more or less following the Capital Ring, though for one reason and another we strayed from that route occasionally.  For most of the time I really didn’t know where I was, which was great, since usually when I walk I’m the one holding the map, plotting the route, making the decisions.

But I do know that at one point we were walking along the Greenway - Plaistow, East Ham sort of way - which is built on the embankment of a sewer.

Frankly, it was a bit bleak up there, and seeing and this sign didn’t add to our sense of well-being.

I mean, we weren't cyclists, so we were presumably not being "targeted" but that still left a lot of possibilities.
   There was a great deal of flotsam and jetsam strewn around atop the sewer embankment, and the most intriguing by far was this safe.  

There must be a good story about where it came from, who carried it up there, how they got it open and what they found inside, but not all stories reveal themselves entirely.

And towards the end of the walk, things all turned a bit JG Ballard – high rises, low flying aircraft (from London City Airport), even a kind of terminal beach, which is by no means the worst way for a walk to turn.

Actually there are times when any walk can turn Ballardian, and it happened to me again just the other day walking in a Battersea Park.  

And likewise here when I was walking in Chicago not so long back.

Do all drained pools invoke Ballard? I suppose for many of us at this point in history, they do.  I wonder what or who they invoked before he wrote about them?

Some details of the exhibition are here:

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS

The traditional Boxing Day walk; this year in the mean streets of Chelsea.  No great surprise to find a Christmas tree thrown out the day after Christmas.

But more surprising to find this; a heap of Christmas trees that, I assume, had remained unsold, never made it into anybody’s home, and so the Christmas tree dealer had dumped them in a pile on the pavement.  

And I can’t decide if this was a kind of altruism, that he’d left the trees there so that the poor and needy could pick one up for free, or whether it was just an advanced form of littering and dumping, and the dealer just couldn’t be arsed to take them away with him. Maybe he had mixed feelings.  Many do at Christmas.

AN AESTHETIC WALK

I went for a walk in Bedford Park, in West London.  As you may have guessed, I’m doing some suburban exploration.

Bedford Park has a good claim to be the first garden suburb.  Work began there in 1875, long before Letchworth Garden City or Hampstead Garden Suburb.  And whereas Letchworth Garden City was built by a visionary, and whereas Hampstead Garden Suburb was built by a social reformer, Bedford Park was built by a slightly dodgy property developer, Jonathan Carr.  

He bought 24 acres of land from his father in law, a ripe plot just north of Turnham Green tube station.  He commissioned EW Godwin and then Norman Shaw to design houses for the suburb, and in the end built 365 houses.  He also had the advantage of having a brother, J. Comyns Carr, who ran the Grosvenor Gallery and was connected with members of the Aesthetic Movement.  He recommended the place to influential and artistic friends, and Bedford Park became something of a Bohemian enclave.  WB Yeats lived there with his father and brother, and it was fashionable enough to have a satirical (and fairly lame) poem written about it, The Ballad of Bedford Park.  One verse runs:

Now he who loves aesthetic cheer
And does not mind the damp
May come and read Rosetti here
By a Japanese-y lamp.

On the map, Bedford Park is now small, triangular, a sort of Christmas tree shape, with The Avenue running up through it like a trunk, and roads off to the sides like branches, though it didn't start out like that.
  A current map shows you the boundaries of the place but these aren’t all that obvious on the ground.  The roads have “good old” English names, Blenheim, Marlborough, Vanbrugh, Fielding, Flanders.

         

Unlike Hampstead Garden Suburb this did feel like London. Some parts of it were very fancy, some not really that fancy at all, but clearly all of it pretty expensive. And unlike Hampstead Garden suburb it has a pub, The Tabard, a pub – designed by Norma Shaw with William de Morgan tiles in the interior.  There was also a Polish shop and a Buddhist Vihara on the Avenue.

I was walking without any great purpose and it was easy to get lost, but it was hard to staylost.  Just by wandering you can find yourself back where you started.  I occasionally I used some interesting old cars parked in the streets as markers, since the cars were rather more distinctive than many of the houses.

Having said that, I was fascinated by the odd combination in the architecture of diversity and similarity.  The original architects had done a certain amount to make the houses look individual and then the inhabitants had taken it further.  These two porches for instance which had surely started out looking identical.

And this succession of gables, no two of them quite the same; some quite plain, some looking like the insignia of a secret organization.

Bedford Park is now a conservation area which means there are strict rules about what you can do to your house, and about what you can do to your trees.  Under Section 211 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 “all trees in the conservation area are protected by law. It is an offence to deliberately damage or destroy a tree by cutting down, topping, lopping, uprooting or by any other means without permission from the local planning authority. … Six weeks’ notice must be given before any work is started.”

On the other hand I did see some dead trees, and some huge pieces of tree trunk, which were possibly located just outside the conservation area.

As for new buildings, well some of the houses are replicas in the Arts and Craft style, which replaced old ones that didn’t suit the tone of the place, but some of the most interesting buildings were a couple of zesty new houses that had been shoehorned in and looked different from the prevailing style and yet to my urban eye didn’t look at all out of place.

         

         

Yes there were gardens, and they were well looked after, nothing very eccentric, nothing kitsch that I could see, but there were some interesting plantings including this, which is one of the biggest olive trees I ever saw in captivity in England:

         Also this tasteful cat statue:

And at one point I became aware of a real cat walking very close to my feet.  It’s a measure of a certain kind of suburb that you see cats wandering freely, even if a few of them have missing ears or shortened tails. Now, I like cats well enough but I don’t like cute cats and there was nothing cute about this one.  He didn’t just look like the cat belonging to the evil genius – he looks like an evil genius in his own right.

 Suburbia is a great place for an evil genius to go into hiding.